IT Rocks! - Part Two, a collection a silly sayings

In reality, some of them may be a bit corny, but they all have real meaning in the context of getting IT to rock. the first, and most important, is "There is nothing more important than our customers". This is how we run the entire company. Of course in IT, we have lots of different customers including external customers (the most important ones, as they keep us in business), partners, and the rest of our internal folks. This sounds so simple, but so many organizations miss it completely. We really take this literally. Any of our customers, whether external or internal, come before any of our own IT priorities. Our help desk tool offers self service to our users, but contrary to the way most folks view self-service tools, the goal of this is not to deflect human contact, it is to let folks interact with us in the way they choose. We encourage our help desk folks to call, or better yet, go see their customers when they work on tickets for them. Think about it, how nice would it be to see a smiling face show up at your cube; "Hi Bill, I'm Don from the IT service desk. I am just checking in to see if you are all set with your mail issue"? At the last place I worked, this would have caused heart attacks. They actually did not have the help desk folks listed in the corporate directory, purposely so you couldn't call them up. No wonder they were universally despised.

Another saying; "Try it, fix it, try it". This sums up our approach for continuous improvement, and also for our iterative approach to adding value to the business. We are not big on grandiose plans that take many months to execute. Business is too fast these days for that. We need to quickly add value, and evolve it over time. This one is also kind of a cousin to "I reserve the right to be smarter tomorrow than I am today", which really means we are not tied to a decision, and can change our minds to adapt quickly to a changing environment. Those that can't adapt will get left behind.

Next, we have "Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good". Sometimes when working to solve a problem for the business, we can envision a beautifully elegant solution, and the only problem is that it really can't be delivered in pieces, so it would be months before the business saw any value. This is actually one my developers struggle with, as they would sometimes like to build the "big thing". The reality is that we can often do something simple that solves 80% of the problem very quickly.While this may be only good, it is often good enough for the business, and they are delighted with the speed of delivery.

The last of my sayings for today, is "Saving money won't get you good IT, but good IT will save you money". This is really about focus. Be careful what you decide your organization is going to focus on, you just might get it. See my rant on Enterprise Architecture. If you loose your focus on the business, and shift it to Architecture, budget reduction ITIL, etc., that is what you'll get, an ITIL shop with great architecture, with barely enough funding to stay alive, and still be hated (and I do not think that is too strong) by the business. By focusing on what was important (Customers First, Enable the Business, and Showcase our Products), we became a valued partner to the business, with a seat at the executive table (I report to the CEO). In the process, because we stopped doing stuff that was not important, we have reduced our spend by just shy of 20% over the last two years (while doing and SAP upgrade, I will add).

I'm sure there are more sayings we use, and I'll try to remember to write them down for another silly sayings post.